and details the challenges that you’ll face if you want to edit Office documents from SharePoint with an iPad. Here is the first part of the story:

One of the most surprising challenges with Office 365’s SharePoint Online is to get it working effectively on an iPad. The solutions are by no means easy or straightforward.

The workaround below uses third-party applications on the iPad as middlemen to download files stored in SharePoint Online to the iPad for editing and then save them back up to SharePoint.

The most important app you’ll need to get documents to and from SharePoint is DropBox. A free account lets you synchronise up to 2GB of files between the cloud and your desktop. Once in the cloud you can access those files from your iPad.

Next you’ll need an iPad app that can read Office documents in DropBox and edit them. There are a few; I chose Office2 Plus. There is both an iPad and an iPhone app starting from around $6. The free versions let you view Office documents but not edit them, which is the same situation if you log in through your browser and use the native Office Web Apps in SharePoint Online. So to edit documents you’ll need to shell out for the full version.

Finally, you are going to need an app that can access your SharePoint Online site. Again, there are a few of these but the one chosen here is called SharePlus. The Pro version is $14.99 which lets you make changes rather than just read files.

Now we have all the apps in place on our iPad (DropBox, Office2 Plus and SharePlus).